In the health care industry, there is a desire to increase safety in the process of administering medications (i.e., drugs or pharmaceuticals) to patients. Recent studies have shown that adverse drug reactions (ADRs), such as drug-drug interactions and drug allergy reactions, occur at an alarming rate. For instance, the Institute of Medicine reported that an estimated 106,000 deaths occurred in 1994 due to ADRs, and more than 2,000,000 hospitalized patients experienced serious, if not fatal, ADRs. Lazarou J. et al., Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies, J. Am. Med. Assn. 1998: 279: 1200-1205. While many of these reactions were attributable to procedural errors, a significant percentage of these reactions were due to inadequate or incomplete information regarding the likely response a particular patient would have to the associated medication.
Sometimes the healthcare worker (e.g., nurse, anesthesiologist, etc.) administering the drug will have a patient's medical record or “chart” available for review prior to taking such action; the medical record includes, for example, information about drugs the patient is currently taking (including vitamins and other natural and synthetic remedies) or allergies to drugs that the patient is known to have. But even if this information is available, the worker still must consult another set of information—specifically pharmacological information regarding drug-drug interactions—to determine whether drugs the patient has already taken would react negatively with a drug to be administered. This sort of information “look-up” or “cross-checking” is subject to human error, and is time consuming, thus reducing efficiency in the delivery of health care services while providing only a moderate level of ADR avoidance. Moreover, such cross-checking becomes increasingly complex when multiple drugs are to be considered as candidates for administration to a patient.